THINK IT Services

THINKstrategies announced today that AccelOps has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program which recognizes SaaS companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

AccelOps allows organizations to better leverage virtualization technologies and cloud computing by providing end-to-end visibility across performance, availability, security and change management while linking the physical and virtual infrastructure to business and business services. AccelOps integrated and service-oriented platform automates the collection, monitoring, analysis and detailed reporting on all performance and IT/event log data with a single pane of glass that cuts through networks, systems, applications, virtualization and technology boundaries.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits AccelOps is delivering to its customers which earned it a BoSS Award.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Award program and to apply for an award.

Based on the success of the BoSS Awards program which focuses on SaaS solutions, THINKstrategies has launched the Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program to recognize companies which are delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions producing measurable business benefits for their customers. Click here to obtain more information regarding the CCBV Awards.

Salesforce.com announced its intention to acquire Jigsaw today and is once again redefining the role of the software vendor and nature of software applications.

Jigsaw, a Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) winner, provides lead generation services via the aggregation of third-party data service feeds combined with a cloud–based, ‘crowd-sourcing’ model.

Jigsaw taps lead gen data from D&B, Hoover’s, LexisNexis and other data sources, and makes it available to sales organizations who in turn clean the data and share their own contact lists in hopes that they will build greater and better quality contacts as a result of participating in Jigsaw’s user community.

Jigsaw’s tight API integration with Salesforce.com makes it relatively easy for users to import third-party contact information into their Salesforce.com’s CRM system. The company’s CEO also told me that its API will be extended to connect to other CRM solutions, including Siebel and Microsoft Dynamics.

Jigsaw’s community-oriented, social network boasts 1.2 million members, which has created a contact database of more than 21 million professionals at nearly 4 million companies. The company has also built a customer base of 800 companies, generating GAAP revenue of approximately $10-$15 million and non-GAAP revenue, excluding the deferred revenue write-down related to the transaction, is expected to be approximately $17-22  million.

Salesforce.com is paying a healthy premium for Jigsaw of $142 million, plus a performance-based contingent earn out of up to 10% of the purchase price. As I see it, Salesforce.com will easily generate a far greater return from this substantial investment in the following ways,

• A CRM system is only as good as the data which it houses. Making quality contact information more easily available, will increase the value of Salesforce.com’s CRM system and increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, etc.
• Jigsaw’s data-as-a-service (DaaS) gives Salesforce.com a new revenue stream and gives it access to an estimated $3 billion cloud-based data services market. This enables Salesforce.com to further diversify its product portfolio.
• Adding Jigsaw’s DaaS to its portfolio also raises the bar to Salesforce.com’s competitors who will now have to tighten their relationship with third-party data sources or make similar acquisitions.

Salesforce.com is already gearing up a new layer of marketing efforts around this acquisition centered on a new tier of services which it will brand as the “Data Cloud”. However, it also intends to retain the Jigsaw brand for the time being to ensure that its services are viewed as vendor-independent.

THINKstrategies announced today that Vivantio has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 to bring attention to SaaS companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

Vivantio provides a suite of easy-to-deploy SaaS-based service management tools which enable customer service and support teams to increase productivity and save money. The flexibility and scalability of Vivantio’s solutions are reflected in its diverse customer base which includes public sector organizations, corporate customers and small service companies.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits Vivantio’s customers have gained from its SaaS solutions that earned the company THINKstrategies’ latest BoSS award.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Award program or to apply for an award.

Based on the success of the BoSS Awards program which focuses on SaaS solutions, THINKstrategies has launched the Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program to recognize companies which are delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions producing measurable business benefits for their customers. For more information regarding the CCBV Awards, go to http://www.thinkstrategies.com/cloudcomputingawards.html.

I’ve heard good things about the Under the Radar Conference for a couple of years, but haven’t been able to attend the event because of scheduling conflicts.

After serving as a corporate partner last year but still being unable to attend, I finally experienced my first Under the Radar conference yesterday not only as an attendee but as the moderator of two of the event’s afternoon sessions.

It was a terrific experience!

The Under the Radar conference showcased startups focused on or taking advantage of cloud computing solutions, in a series of tightly choreographed presentations and panel Q&A sessions akin to an American Idol talent show.

The conference founders and staff leverages their expansive rolodexes of relationships to pull together a wide range of entrepreneurs, CIOs, investors, business development professionals and folks like myself to serve as judges and moderators.

While some of the solutions presented during the sessions involved byzantine technologies which far exceeded my technical knowledge, the purpose of the event was to test them against the realities of today’s enterprise requirements and marketplace realities.

It was also to encourage people to establish new relationships, or even initiate a sale, investment or acquisition.

I had the pleasure of moderating two of the sessions focused on,

• Communications including AwayFind, CubeTree, Fonolo, SendGrid.
• Application Development & Management including AppDynamics, AppFirst, Makara, and ‘Grad Circle’ companies beyond the start-up stage – Heroku, New Relic, WaveMaker.

Click here to see the video archives of their presentations and the Q&A sessions, as well as to see the winning companies.

I want to congratulate and complement the Under the Radar staff for a superb event, and thank my friend Joe Weinman for turning me on to it and encouraging me to participate.

THINKstrategies announced yesterday that Caspio, Inc. has been named the first winner of the new Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s cloud computing solutions.

The CCBV Awards program was announced in January 2010 to recognize Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers delivering tangible business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits include lower costs, faster deployment times, greater profitability, etc.

The Award program builds on the success of THINKstrategies’ Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program which was initiated in 2009.

Caspio provides an on-demand, do-it-yourself, web application creation PaaS which replaces coding with intuitive point-and-click wizards, enabling users to rapidly produce web database components for capturing, publishing, and managing data online. Caspio’s customers range from one-person entrepreneurs to Fortune-500 corporations, digital media giants, government agencies, and educational institutions.

Click here to read more about Caspio’s award-winning business benefits.

Click here to read more about the CCBV Awards program or to apply for an award.

I’ve been predicting for over a year, that despite the rapid growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market many aspiring best-of-breed vendors will not survive an industry shakeout or the short attention spans of their venture funding sources.

The latest case in point is Helpstream which discontinued operations this past month. I first reported on the company in 2008 when it originally launched as Pathworks Software and caught my attention because of the way it promised to leverage the Open Source pricing model and community building orientation.

In essence, Helpstream was one of the first SaaS companies in the helpdesk market to recognize the powerful potential of a social networking capability embedded into an enterprise app.

Since then, saleforce.com has picked up the baton and is very quickly demonstrating the tangible benefits which can be derived from merging a Facebook-like capability into its CRM/SFA solution with its Chatter offering.

All it takes is a couple of minutes watching a demo or talking to a current beta user to see how this ‘nice to have’ feature can quickly become a ‘must have’ functionality, just like many people discovered when instant messaging penetrated the workplace.

The net result is that Chatter is going to create new expectations among customers and set a new standard for software vendors about how enterprise applications are architected and designed. This is going to raise the bar and compound the challenges facing the established players.

Unfortunately, Helpstream won’t be able to capitalize on this exciting and disruptive market opportunity. Although it is rumored to have had about 50 customers and $1 million in revenues, and even won a Best of SaaS Showplace Award, Helpstream wasn’t growing fast enough to satisfy its backers and couldn’t secure another round of funding. A common end to a promising company.

In the same way that LucidEra was ahead of its time in the SaaS business intelligence (BI) sector and succumbed to a sad demise last year, Helpstream is the latest poster-child for the perils of today’s SaaS start-ups.

So, now various competitors like Parature are vying for Helpstream’s customers and other vendors are assessing Helpstream’s remaining assets to determine if they are worth acquiring.

Potential acquirers recognize that building a successful social networking capability internally is a long-shot. Even salesforce.com has made a series of unannounced acquisitions to create Chatter, including GroupSwim.

However, any vendor considering a big purchase in this space should pay attention to AOL’s ill-fated acquisition of Bebo two years ago which failed to match Facebook’s success and is now worth pennies on the dollar in a potential divestiture.

This week’s NCAA college basketball championship between Duke and Butler University offered plenty of life lessons for everyone, including the software and technology industry.

I took particular interest in the game because my oldest son is a sophomore at Butler which became the center of attention because of the ‘feel-good’ story surrounding the school. For anyone who isn’t aware of the dynamics that made the Duke-Butler championship special and didn’t see the game, it was a classic Cinderella and ‘David and Goliath’ story wrapped into one.

Duke is a pre-eminent basketball power with a long history of success on the national stage that has enabled the school to spend lavishly to attract elite ballplayers for decades. Butler is a respectable but little known ‘mid-major’ program which most people viewed as an unlikely challenger because the college is a fraction of the size of the top basketball institutions, spends less than 1/15 as much on its basketball program as Duke, and had never been past the ‘Sweet 16′ round of the tournament.

Despite its smaller stature, financially and physically, Butler reached the finals with a series of inspirational wins over higher ranked teams. Butler’s successful run was particularly poignant because of the way it won each game with poise, determination and intelligence which demonstrated a level of maturity and confidence combined with dignity and respect which is seldom seen among athletes of any age.

That same persona was on display again in the championship game which Butler nearly won, missing a couple shots in the final seconds by inches. Although most athletes will reject the idea of ‘moral victories’, Butler’s gallant efforts set a new standard for sportsmanship among athletes at all levels. It also gave other small schools greater confidence that they can compete with major institutions. Even more importantly, Butler’s story rekindled people’s faith and support of the ‘little guy’.

The analogy in the software and technology industry is the way that a new generation of small yet quickly growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing companies are going toe-to-toe with the established vendors to win customers and disrupt the status quo. These upstarts are gaining traction because they are working harder than the established players to develop and deliver solutions which satisfy customers’ rapidly changing needs and expectations.

Today’s SaaS and cloud computing providers may not win every head-to-head battle, but they are winning the hearts and minds of IT and business decision-makers, and letting the established players know that they are in for a real battle, just like Butler demonstrated against Duke.

THINKstrategies announced today that LogicMonitor has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.
 
The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 by THINKstrategies as an initiative aimed at bringing greater attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.
 
LogicMonitor provides automated monitoring, trending, and alerting for the entire data center infrastructure from a single, affordable SaaS-based solution. LogicMonitor’s Active Discovery engine performs ongoing discovery of new devices and device changes, eliminating the need for continuous monitoring configuration.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits which earned LogicMonitor the latest BoSS Award.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Award program or to apply for an award.

Based on the success of the BoSS Awards program which focuses on SaaS solutions, THINKstrategies as launched a new Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program to recognize companies which are delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions producing measurable business benefits for their customers. For more information regarding the CCBV Awards, go to http://www.thinkstrategies.com/cloudcomputingawards.html.